Ok, so, unless you have been living in a Cave, you know that there was a great event held on Wednesday. Something all the media covered. Something everyone was waiting for with baited breath. Steve Jobs announced the fabled Apple Tablet. (And some guy named Obuma was doing some standup comedy later in the evening as well).
A lot of Gadget people were bemoaning the lack of this or that. No camera (front or rear), no USB, no HDMI, no Verizon, no Multitasking, no FLASH. Waaa! Sadly, these people are missing the point. It does need to have these things and was designed not to (except maybe the camera…rumors are that there was a prototype version that had one, and the software seems to have hooks for them).
So, what does this mean? And what does this mean for musicians. Can start scanning all our books into the computer? Can we ditch that lame electronic music things like this, this and this? Well, for traditional musicians, I think that scanning your music is a music regardless of what you plan on viewing it on. It might sound like a waste of time, but when you can’t find that book of etudes by so and so that you know you have but don’t know what happened to it….and that it is out of print. Yeah, you’ll be happy that you had the foresight to scan a copy for your archive. Now, viewing music that was made for 8 1/2″ by 11″ pieces of paper on a 9.56″ x 7.47″ device (slightly smaller actual viewing area)? Dunno. Obviously the music would need to be scaled down. Would that make it unreadable then? Dunno. However, if the music is formatted for that size, it would be no problem. Perhaps some witty programmer will design a program that will slice up music PDFs and make them more viewable. I for one plan on offering up iPad versions of stuff here. So, people with iPad can practice the tomb of II/V patterns, or Brecker solos, or whatever.
I think the bigger impact is going to be the cool apps for this. If you have an iPhone/iTouch, you already know all the handy apps out there for it. Now, increase the screen size 3 times and make it faster……can we say mixing applications? Slowdown apps? Multitrack recording device? Practice tool? Tuner? Hmmm….
